Memorial service for Barney Frank set for Faneuil Hall, expected to draw prominent Democrats

A celebration of life will be held Monday morning for former US Representative Barney Frank, who died last month at the age of 86.

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The event is scheduled for 10 a.m. at Faneuil Hall, organizers said in a statement.

A number of prominent Democrats are expected to speak including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Senator Senator Chris Dodd, Mayor Michelle Wu, and Governor Maura Healey, the statement said.

Frank, a veteran US House member, a pioneering gay-rights advocate, and a leading figure in the battle to recover from the 2008 Great Recession — died May 19 in his Ogunquit, Maine, home of complications from congestive heart failure.

Unlike major Bay State political figures such as Henry Cabot Lodge, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., Frank was influential in the three dimensions of local, state, and national politics. He left his fingerprints on how Boston is governed, how the Legislature operates on Beacon Hill, and how the House works on Capitol Hill.

His reach also extended into the American economy and the American culture, into how Wall Street operates and how high finance is regulated.

And in a 1987 Boston Globe interview, he became the first member of Congress to publicly come out as gay voluntarily.

Mr. Frank’s most notable legislation was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which regulates aspects of the financial markets.

His imprint is on the changes that rendered the Legislature more representative and more accountable. His footprints remain on Capitol Hill, where his sharp insights and acerbic wit lanced the hoary customs of deference that governed the House since the Civil War years.

Through more than a half-century of political activism, political agitation, political campaigning, and political maneuvering, his presence on the left in Massachusetts politics exceeded the combined left field tenure of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski in Fenway Park.

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When he announced in 2011 that he would not seek a 17th term in Congress, he told The New York Times that it had “been a privilege to fight for the quality of people’s lives, but I’m ready to put a little more quality into my own life.”

Frank came under fire when it was revealed he had hired Steve Gobie, a prostitute whom he had paid for sex one time, to be his driver and personal assistant, thinking that he could “change his life.”

The House voted in 1990 to reprimand Mr. Frank, for using his House privileges to waive 33 parking tickets Gobie accumulated while driving Mr. Frank’s car, and for writing a misleading memo to try to end Gobie’s probation on felony charges. In a report, the House ethics committee said, however, that the evidence didn’t support Gobie’s claim that Mr. Frank knew Gobie was running a sex-for-hire ring out of Mr. Frank’s apartment.

“Thinking I was going to be Henry Higgins and trying to turn him into Pygmalion was the biggest mistake I’ve made,” Mr. Frank said in a 1989 news conference, adding that he didn’t know Gobie was running the prostitution service.

In a May 3 interview, when he was in hospice care, Mr. Frank was asked if he had any regrets. “I wish I had come out earlier,” he said, “and that I’d handled that better.”

Throughout his career Mr. Frank was a supporter of abortion rights and legislation to control the spread of guns, and he was an early advocate of legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes.

“In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Barney Frank was the gravelly voiced, smart-as-a-whip congressman who fought hard to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the finish line,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said. “His one-liners were wicked and wickedly funny. Barney delivered for working people, and the world is a poorer place without him.”

Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report. This story will be updated.

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